Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America
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“Mr. Johnson, we’re here for your therapy. Can you open your eyes?” Damn course he could open his eyes! Who did they think he was? It was pre-school talk that they were offering.
“You ever throw a bale?” He said that while opening.
“Mr. Johnson, what? A hay bale?” She had big round breasts and flabby arms where the triceps would be. She was frowning now, no doubt because he had raised in her mind the question of what it was they had taught her some time back: orientation to reality.
“Do you know what the day is today, Mr. Johnson?”
Oh, hell, he knew! He could feel the sheet and blanket eased back off of his body. He looked and the frown was still there.
“It’s Tuesday, and I am Debbie, and we are here for your physical therapy session.”
“What’s this ‘we’ stuff?” He had this sudden impulse to be unkind. She was there for pain, and both he and the voice knew it. He raised up and the voice swore red at him and he swore. She blinked at the word, then tried to move past it.
“Well, o.k., but it’s time to get going. We got to get you up. It’s Tuesday morning.”
“Damnation! All this talk about ‘we’ and about ‘Tuesday’! Have you ever thrown a hay bale?”
The voice was in his voice. He could feel it rising. See it, red and purple.
“Well, no…”
“Well, shit, I suppose not.” The red and purple voice was shining bright now with wavering colors. She looked as though she might want to cry, but of course would not.
“I suppose not.” Going now: it was going, released and subsiding. “Well, Debbie, this is what you get. This is what you get when it comes to you.”
She looked at him, stared at him really, then said something that made the voice shrink even further.
“Mr. Johnson, it’s Tuesday morning, Mr. Johnson, and we’ve got work to do. And no time for hay bales. No time for hay bales—or self pity. Come on, now, let’s get you up.”
She was quick for her large form. Agile. And her hands were strong. He could feel them slide under him and then feel the pressure of them lifting. He lifted with them and then he was up.
“Now you just swing your feet over, there you go, and sit with your legs over the side and rest awhile.”
The room was spinning. He looked for the ceiling and found the sky like he had seen it, that one last look while the cat looked, just before he was free. Ernie came by the other day with his dad, Bill Sandstrom, and he had told him how he fell. Said he dropped straight down, head first, when something happened. Maybe the hay bales he was with. Anyway, Ernie said, his body had turned some at the very end, so he was mostly flat.
Said he fell on and between the bales, but when he hit, there was this awful sound: he must have hit his head on the deck, the barn floor itself, though Ernie could not see. Ran over there:
“Mister Johnson, you was out cold, so I ran for help.”
Bone on wood. That was what gave him the voice. He supposed this, of course. Conjecture. All of this was past the mind, past memory. He could see his body falling through Ernie’s words, but not from inside. Some day he would go back. Look for the stain of the blood that he had left there. And his mind and body would be pulled back some, but he doubted he would ever go there, past the orange cat and into the space of that dead, humid air, into the blackness of that time, with any more of memory than he already had. It just hung there, a dead place in the middle of his life, waiting to be touched.
“Mr. Johnson? Things quieted down for you?”
“Quieted some.” He was beginning to like this woman. Respect her. She had good instincts, he thought—a strength he had not understood, but now yielded to as she reached around him to put the belt on and brought him to his feet.
“Damn!’ The spinning had retreated just to the ceiling and the lights, but now it was the whole damn room again, whirling, reeling, twisting until the walls were a wash rag, wrung out and then twisted and wrung again.
“You just stand there a while, get your bearings, feel any pain on that ankle?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s a good start, then. The last thing we want is you lying down there in that bed. Got a farm to tend to, I suppose.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He felt the soft of her arm on his back and the pressure of her flesh one with her voice:
“Now, let’s just see if you can take a step or two.”
“All right.”
“Small steps.”
“Small.”
“Yes, that’s it, nice and small.” It was a shuffle, really. Nothing like a step or a stride. Not even a half-step, dancing. But the ceiling and the walls were quiet, and he was up, and for the first time in a long time—days or weeks was it?—he was moving.
“Now, when we get to that door there, I want you to stand. Just stand, while I get a chair. And then we’ll take a little break.”
“I see.”
When he got back to the bed, the nurse came with some pain medication. Two pills, dull orange, which reminded him, as he took them, of the cat. What had happened to the cat? He tried leaning back and the voice was waiting, but he was trying hard not to listen. He leaned back some more, onto the pillow, gently—listening to the grumbling of the voice, but not letting it growl or shout out into the pure red of its fury.
Instead, the pressure of his head on the pillow made him think once again of the barn. Ernie said he and his dad had gotten the rest of the second crop cut and baled and into the barn for him. Said that they both were looking after his cows. Things were fine.
A strange word, “fine.” Where are the boundaries? The room was settling down and the voice ebbing as the pills worked. He could feel his joints ache and the tiredness, the strange tiredness for him, of muscles soft and unused to being worked now complaining. Almost asleep. He would yield, but there was one more thought that was coming to him. One more thought like a bale to be pulled free, counted, lifted and thrown.
He reached through the veil of sleep and hooked it. Lying there, eyes closed, he, Robert Johnson, decided that all of this would be past when he could walk into his own barn and climb the ladder to the hay mow. He could see himself there. He would hook a few bales and throw them down for the cows. Even though he hoped it still would be summer or early fall, with plenty of green grass in all the pastures, he would do it anyways: a ceremonial of hay, just two or three, for the cows.
But there was something more to do. Perhaps this would come later, he did not know. Maybe even blending of winter into early spring—a time when the mountain of the hay would have melted to a pile, a time when the cows would willingly put their noses into all of that sweet hay and dream of being set free into the pasture greening up outside. Then— in the soft waning light of last-winter—he would turn to the hay.
Lying on the sheets, Robert Johnson could visualize it. He would take his hook and move the bales. He would find the spot. It would be brown and dried out, this blood, but he would find it nevertheless and trace it with his hand. And if any bales persisted in being in the way, he would make a space, push them away, until there was room for his entire body.
It would be quiet. Robert Johnson imagined afternoon. He would be tired from work—the little of work that there was for him in winter. The humid breathing of the cows would roll out onto the air just below him as they ate. Maybe even the orange cat would be around, who knows? But what he was after was this: he would lie down, place himself just at the spot so that his head and the brown spot would touch. Gently he would touch: bone on wood, metal plate resting on the grain of old wood.
He would lie there a moment, his mind, his spirit reaching for what he could never truly know. And then, just like he had done today, Robert Johnson would rise from his old, harsh bed. He would rise and there would be no strong hands pressing, pushing him up. Only his spirit would be there, lifting. Gently, firmly it would press him up. And in the quiet of the hay mow, when he moved from thi
s chosen spot, he, Robert Johnson, would be free. Standing on the barn floor in the midst of the soft tombstones of hay, he would be free to move into the rest of his days.
Resting in his hospital bed with the voice subsiding, Robert Johnson could see it now, the final chapter, the way it would end. Seeing it was good, real good.
He smiled. He slept.
SAYING GOODBYE
Troubles cured you salty as a country ham,
smoky to the taste, thick skinned and tender inside
but nobody could take nourishment...
— Marge Piercy